Retraction Watch

Forensics Friday: You’re the reviewer. What do you recommend for this panel?

Ever wanted to hone your skills as a scientific sleuth? Now’s your chance.

Thanks to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), which is committed to educating authors on best practices in publishing, figure preparation, and reproducibility, we’re presenting the twelfth in a series, Forensics Friday.

Take a look at the image below, and then take our poll. (We recommend using the Chrome browser.) After that, click on the link below to find out the right answer.

Prof who lost emeritus status for views on race and intelligence has paper flagged

A former emeritus professor who has been called “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists operating today” has had one of his papers subjected to an expression of concern.

Richard Lynn, who was stripped of his emeritus status at Ulster University last year after students there protested his views, published “Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence” in the MDPI journal Psych on April 24 of this year, after originally submitting it on April 1.

However, just four months later, the journal published an expression of concern about the paper. It begins with a seemingly innocuous premise, that the article is misclassified:

Conflicts of disinterest: Why does it take a publisher 18 months, and counting, to correct papers?

On February 23, 2018, Stephen Barrett — a physician in the United States perhaps best known for his work at Quackwatch — sent Dove Press this message:

I believe you have published 20 articles in 6 of your journals in which the lead author did not make a full conflict-of-interest disclosure. Please email me directly with the name and email address of an individual to whom I should report.

The lead author in question was Marty Hinz. As Barrett writes in a summary of the case:

Materials scientist up to five retractions as publishers investigate dozens of his papers

A materials scientist in Australia, by way of Iran, has recently had five papers retracted for duplicating his prior work, and the reader who brought the issue to publishers’ attention says it could affect some 100 articles.

Ali Nazari, now of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, was at Islamic Azad University in Iran when he published the five papers in Energy and Buildings, an Elsevier title, in 2010 and 2011. The retractions came sometime after January of this year, when an anonymous reader contacted Elsevier about dozens of Nazari’s papers.

A typical notice, for “Physical, mechanical and thermal properties of concrete in different curing media containing ZnO2 nanoparticles,” reads:

Journal expresses a great deal of concern over deceased author’s work

A gastroenterology journal has issued an extensive expression of concern about a 2013 paper by Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese endocrinologist who has posthumously been climbing the Retraction Watch leaderboard. (He’s now ranked number three, ahead of Diederik Stapel.)

To call the statement an “expression of concern” is like calling Charles M. Schulz a talented cartoonist, or Escoffier a pretty good cook. Indeed, the journal expresses so much concern, about, well, so much, that we’re not sure what in the paper would be left unscathed.

Sato, formerly of Hirosaki University, currently has 77 retractions for a range of misconduct-related issues including likely data fabrication and duplication.

Weekend reads: Findings linked to $183 million deal questioned; how Jeffrey Epstein’s money blinded scientists; “a scientific Ponzi scheme”

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of a bad trip for some drug researchers; a suspension for an earthquake researcher; and our ninth birthday. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Forensics Friday: What would you do if you were the reviewer?

Ever wanted to hone your skills as a scientific sleuth? Now’s your chance.

Take a look at the image below, and then take our poll. (We recommend using the Chrome browser.) After that, click on the link below to find out the right answer.

Happy birthday, Retraction Watch: We’re turning nine

Nine years ago this coming Saturday, on August 3, 2010, we published a post, “Why write a blog about retractions?”

Why, indeed!

What has become clear in the intervening nine years is what a rich vein retractions are as stories of what happens when something goes wrong in science. And as we have done every year at this time, we’ll review what happened in the last 12 months.

Drug researchers trip up, lifting meth paper to write one on LSD

Evidently meth is a gateway drug … for publishing misconduct.

Researchers in China have lost a 2019 paper on how LSD can damage eyesight because they’d lifted much of the paper from an article that had appeared the year before in a different journal — about methamphetamine.

The retracted article, “Long-term systemic treatment with lysergic acid diethylamide causes retinal damage in CD1 mice,” appeared in Human & Experimental Toxicology. According to the article:

Authors object as “doubtful” data doom dermatology paper

A dermatology journal has retracted a 2017 article by a pair of researchers in Saudi Arabia after receiving a “serious complaint” about the integrity of the data. But the first author of the paper pushed back, saying the move was unjustified.

The article, “Successful use of combined corticosteroids and rituximab in a patient with refractory cutaneous polyarteritis nodosa,” was written by Ibrahim Al-Homood and Mohammad Aljahlan, rheumatologists at King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh and appeared in the Journal of Dermatology & Dermatologic Surgery. It described (with rather grisly pictures) the case of a 25-year-old man with severe leg ulcers that resolved after the described combination therapy.

But at the notice explains, the paper can’t be trusted:

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